


Handyman

by misslonelyhearts



Series: Kink in the Armor [1]
Category: Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Confessional, F/M, Hand Jobs, M/M, Religion Kink, The Chantry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-04
Updated: 2014-09-04
Packaged: 2018-02-16 03:35:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2254383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>as part of the Kink in the Armor writing relay i was given the first prompt: Confessional handjobs</p>
            </blockquote>





	Handyman

He is eight years old when he wanders into the Chantry confession hall to find the heartshrift box shuddering against the wall. The heavy velvet curtain swings just a little on its brass rings, and behind it someone moans. The moan is thin and muffled, and it empties from the unseen throat for so long that Cullen feels himself redden. He can’t name a reason for his blush.   He has never heard a person make a noise like that, not even at supper when the biscuits are crisp and soft, fresh from the oven.  
  
The box goes still, the moan subsides, and Cullen thinks his hammering heart is loud enough for them, for anyone, to hear. He runs from the Chantry.  
  
His swift, poorly-shod feet carry him over the pavestones, back to the children’s house, with a slapping beat.  
  
At supper, an older girl tells him it’s just what happens sometimes.    
  
“The Box is good for two things, yeah: Getting in good with the Maker, and getting off,” she says with a grin, winking at the girl with the braids who sits across from her. “Do it at the same time and you get a prize.”    
  
They laugh. Everyone around him at the longtable laughs, even the boys as young as he, who know even less than he does.  So Cullen turns red again.  Being good for the Maker can’t be a bad thing, so why’s it so funny?  The older girl takes the biscuit off his plate, and Cullen doesn’t stop her. It’s stale, anyway.  
  
.  
  
He is thirteen when he asks the Sister who approaches him in the confessional hall if she knows what goes on there.  He has been standing there for fifteen heavy minutes, bookended by quiet, unmoving heartshrift boxes.  When she touches his shoulder, inquires if he’s okay, Cullen asks her if she knows about the last Box on the right.  
  
She’s the youngest in the Chantry, and Cullen likes her best.   
  
“Do you?” she replies.  Her warm hand leaves his shoulder.  
  
He goes to the Box a lot these days.  He visits in the morning, and also later when all the lamps are snuffed.  It’s been a lot of whispered years in this hall, he would like to tell her, waiting in line for a secret show, some reward no one will tell him about. He would like to explain that despite never seeing the act, he sort of feels it.  But he can’t tell a holy woman something that makes no sense. Ignorance aggravates him, but at least it’s his to keep or share.  
  
He says, “No, Sister.”   
.  
  
He is seventeen when he moans behind the curtain.   
  
They love him for it.   
  
They call him Handyman.  
  
They murmur little jokes about his gritted teeth and his keening sighs.  Cullen’s aptitude for ‘shrift’ spreads among the others, a panting spectrum of knobby elbows, blown pupils, scraggly hair and thickening hips. They duck into the Box for his rough and furious hands, for his tenderness, too. They get him off with uneven enthusiasm.  He feels good, though, loved in a way only cast-offs know how, and forgets to care if the Maker cares.  
  
Ben likes eye-contact, he demands it.  He is birdy and dark, and he commands Cullen to keep it up, to stare into the black pools of his eyes while they go at it. They play a game of chicken, but it’s cocks out behind the curtain. And it is Cullen’s corded forearm reaching through the wide slot in the partition designed for hands clasped in forgiveness.  If he looks away then he loses what is owed him in return for his service in the Box.  So Cullen’s big hand jacks dutifully under Ben’s touch, under Ben’s flighty need, and he never looks away.  
  
“That’s lovely mate, thanks for that. Oh, fuck me.”  Ben’s head lolls against the back of the Box.  He squeezes his eyes shut and presses his fists against them.  
  
Alright, Cullen whispers in his own head.  But Ben’s canny jet-shiny eyes see all that pathetic unuttered desire plain as day, even in the dark behind the ironwork partition.  
  
“Nah, I got just the thing for you. But we’ve got to be quick,” he says, buttoning up in a hurry.  Cullen sees the dull gleam of teeth flashing as Ben gives him a fox’s smile. “Wait here.  You’re going to love this.”  
  
He leaves Cullen there, holding onto himself like his cock’s got answers no one else has.  It does not.  It remains as hard and dumb as Cullen himself. His balls are heavy with the same nothing as Ben’s.  He wipes his sticky hand on the side of his trousers.  
  
The curtain on the other side of the Box parts, revealing a Chantry Sister.   
  
Cullen panics, covering his lap and scrunching down, a hundred apologies and excuses congealing on his tongue. But, when she sits he sees that it’s only Tilly.  Ben had sent him Tilly, just another resident of charity like him, and just as old in all the growing parts.  But she looks different than her usual self.  
  
Her short, perpetually dirty red hair is shiny and pinned back.  Instead of the house hand-me-downs, she wears what Cullen assumes to be the stolen robes of a Lay Sister.  They hang on her, but the effect is mostly convincing because of her height and age. It works on Cullen, anyway.  
  
She licks her lips and smoothes the garment with both hands, proud of the trick they’ve played on him.  Tilly’s small breasts slope gently under the faded sunburst embroidery.  
  
He should go soft at the sight of her. Maker help him, his entire body does the opposite. It’s the first time the word ‘fuck’ means something to him, and he cannot run away from the images it conjures.  
  
Tilly leans close to the ironwork, her wet mouth near Cullen’s ear, and whispers, “Do you have anything to conf-”  
  
“Shut up.”  The voice in Cullen’s throat sounds too deep, too ragged.  He shuts his eyes, squeezes his cock, and fights his hot confusion.  
  
“Well, that’s not very nice,” says Tilly.  He feels her narrow-eyed gaze through the partition, but he doesn’t look at her.  After a moment, she huffs and says, “Alright then, I’m not hanging about while you dither.”   
  
She stands, and he grabs the partition because he cannot snatch at her robe.  
  
“Stay, please,” Cullen says.  He grips the ironwork pattern.  “I’m sorry.”  
  
Tilly sits with a prim little sigh.  Cullen can’t tell if she’s still acting the part, or undecided about the role.  His body decides, but he does not.  They sit together like proper idiots, one bored and one achey, both confounded.  
  
She rests her elbow on the ledge of the open slot.  
  
“If you’re not going for the handy, then what?  Actual _shrift_?” Tilly says.  Cullen watches her long fingers draw hearts on the wood, and the turning bones of her wrist poking out from the rose-colored sleeve.  Her voice is toneless when she says, “We’ve all got more’n a few things to answer for, I guess.”   
  
Cullen looks down at his lap, at the swollen evidence of the fact, and wants to laugh. He prays for a fraction of Ben’s certainty.  
  
“Maybe, I don’t know,” says Cullen.  Behind the tickling urge to chuckle waits a storm of tears. “I mean, if I still want to, am I doomed or something?”  
  
She looks at Cullen with serious, unshuttered eyes.  
  
“Nobody cares,” Tilly replies, and it’s all the assuredness Cullen will never have. All his life he has borrowed it from others.  With her stolen authority, Tilly gives him a sort of permission, leaning into the partition to tell him plainly, “If the Maker cared, if anyone cared, we wouldn’t be here.  Wouldn’t get away with any of this, right?”  
  
Then, she reaches through and squeezes his hand. The comfort is brief, though, as Tilly leans further forward to grip his cock.  She smiles at him, her nose slightly bent, pressed into the partition. Cullen sucks air between his teeth, thighs tensing, and moans.  
  
There is enough room to allow a kiss, which Cullen does because the ironwork frames Tilly’s parted mouth like a portrait. Just for him.  
  
“It might be a, a t-test, you know.” He crams his forehead against the partition, panting into her cheek with every tug she gives him. “Letting us get away with this stuff.”  
  
She snorts. Her strokes are short and firm, not like Ben’s or anyone’s really.  
  
He is close, so disappointingly close.   
  
“Come on then, get up,” Tilly says, maneuvering him onto one knee.  He grabs the partition, iron digging into his knuckles, his cock jutting through the window meant for shared prayer.    
  
Tilly works him that way.  She sinks down so she’s on the level with her handiwork when she laughs, cooing huskily, “That’s right, love. You bless me and I’ll bless you.”  
  
Cullen comes to his short end, to what feels like the everloving bottom of his balls.  With a jaw-clenched moan that tapers to an older man’s sigh all the string goes out of him. He hangs onto the ironwork as if it can be his bones from now on.    
  
And it is an older woman’s smirk that spreads across Tilly’s face.  Looking down past her chin, Cullen sees a splattered stain dampening the sunburst on her chest.  
  
  
.  
  
He is twenty-two, his blood full of thrilling blue light, when he remembers that the Circle contains no heartshrift boxes. Standing in Kinloch’s worship hall, Cullen tries to think of why their absence is important to him.  He supposes that mages must confess in other ways.  Templars, too.  
  
.  
  
He is thirty, or twenty-nine, or eight, or sixty and irrevocably broken when he stands in the Blooming Rose.  He is there to collect information about Wilmod, about his own recruits, but finds himself distracted.  Confusion often visits Cullen in the line of duty, like a stinging blue mandate, but the befuddlement he suffers in the Rose has a different texture altogether.  
  
It is not simple confusion, but a tactile memory that stirs him as profoundly as if it had reached out and gripped him.   
  
In a corner of the common area stands a succession of folding partitions.  They are made of filigreed ironwork, their frames upholstered with thick yards of velvet.  The rooms upstairs exist for more involved trysts, but the array of partitions draws his eye, and his body.  
  
Ignoring the Madam’s protests, he takes a step toward them, and then another.  He is tall and armored and feels precisely like a snotty child with his malnourished heart thundering in his chest. When he squares himself before the nearest partition, close enough to touch its cool metal, to finger the rich emerald fabric, Cullen freezes.  Stuttering moans, elongated moans, masculine and feminine moans emanate from behind the zig-zagging battlement of velvet and iron.    
  
It is a chorus of the temporarily enthralled, humming through an ecstasy bought more cheaply than his own had ever been.  Cullen wonders how much. He wonders if he can still run in a skirt.  
  
“Tell you what, Knight-Captain,” says Madam Lusine behind him.  When he wheels around, the first thing he sees is her painted, parted mouth.  Above it, her eyes are shrewd.  She says, “Make a purchase, it doesn’t have to be much, but buy any service we offer and I’ll see about letting my girls answer your questions.”  
  
The little boy is running already. He is late for supper and blushing furiously as his legs piston on the pavestones.  It’s just what happens sometimes.  He won’t know until he does, when he’s older, when they want him to, when they want him. He won’t know until he is nothing more than a small death in a dark box.  
  
Cullen gives Madam Lusine a tight bow followed by a polite smile.  He says, “No, thank you,” with a misery reserved for martyrs and lovers.  Her expression confirms what he already knows: in his life, he is destined to be neither.


End file.
